Introduction

The following sketches of Emily Brontë's relation to four of the great Romantic poets — Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron and Coleridge — are not studies of influence in the usual straightforward sense. They are not part of an investigation into the ‘sources’ of Wuthering Heights. They are, however, concerned with deep affinities (and divisions) in the creative spirit. Emily Brontë was in many ways a child of the Romantic movement. Wuthering Heights is as much a Romantic poem as an early Victorian novel; it could be said to represent the Romantic version of the Shakespearian drama which all the Romantic poets wanted to convert into a genre of their age. Apart from Shakespeare, whose influence is so fundamental that it is always acknowledged rather than analysed, sources for Wuthering Heights are generally sought in Romantic and Gothic prose fiction (‘read Scott alone’, recommended Charlotte to Ellen Nussey, in relation to novels.)1 Parallels with Scott and Hoffmann, however, tend inevitably to be of a superficial and literal-minded nature, and do not illumine, except negatively by contrast, the quality of Emily Brontë's poetic creative spirit. It is very difficult to determine precisely what Emily Brontë had read. Certainly internal evidence indicates that she was influenced by all these four poets, in differing ways. Byron, for example, was the Brontës' idol from childhood, so his influence appears at different levels of complexity. The influence of Coleridge is more elusive and less evident on the surface, but the deep metaphysical parallels are stronger. This might apply also to Blake, though he is not discussed here. In comparing Emily Brontë's Romantic spirit to that of some of her great predecessors, I am not searching for an ultimate unifying generalisation, although the Romantic-agony association of creation with ‘a strange way of killing’ is obvious, as an organising metaphor current in the age. Rather, I have emphasised primarily the parallel concern of Emi